Vivaldi high CPU usage with nothing on, Private window takes 10+ seconds to load

[vybo]

Hi, I have a mix of various issues that started happening for me only after a recent Windows/Vivaldi update.

Basically it uses about a Core's worth of usage doing nothing and when I try to open a Private window, it takes a very long time to show the UI. It takes the same amount of time to show a normal window as well, if launching Vivaldi from cold.

You can't really see a 100 % usage, because the thread scheduler probably makes the process jump across CPU cores, however Vivaldi uses around 15-20 % of resources, which it didn't before.

This has been going on for more than a day. Restarting Vivaldi or rebooting Windows does not help.

Is there something that I can try to fix this?

I've recorded the video what happens here: https://youtu.be/PkhJfKJhzDk

Vivaldi 6.8.3381.48 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Windows 11 Version 23H2 (Build 22631.3593)

EDIT: Reinstalling Vivaldi by itself didn't help. I had to delete all user data and then reinstall, which did help with this issue.

It's a very bad experience though, because all my customizations (custom menus, quick commands, etc.) are gone.

[jrkl75]

The video is confusing to me. What are you doing exactly? Why are you opening multiple instances for example. Also, what is the configuration of your system? Have you tried Vivaldi without plugins?

[DoctorG]

@vybo Do you allow extensions to load in Private Window (Ingonito)?
What happens if you start Vivaldi from command line
Start cmd.exe
Enter command start vivaldi --disable-extensions

[vybo]

@DoctorG I have disabled all of the extensions I have used and it made no difference, both for normal Vivaldi launch (first window slow to load) or for the private windows slowly launching. I haven't tried to launch Vivaldi with this specific parameter though. The issue was resolved by deleting all of my user data in Vivaldi's AppData folder and reinstalling Vivaldi, so I cannot try, unfortunately.

I will keep your suggestion in mind to try if it happens again, thank you.

[Pathduck]

@vybo Did you use/enable the Mail/RSS/Calendar client? It's known to use excessive CPU in some cases, no idea why.

If you deleted your profile and all is fine, I'm assuming you either don't use the client or didn't know if you enabled it at all. Many users enable the client without knowing because the startup "wizard" leads them to enable it (IMO this is bad but I don't use it anyway...)

Also you should enable showing of PIDs in Task Manager, so you can correlate the PIDs with the processes showing in Vivaldi's internal task manager (Shift+ESC).

[vybo]

@Pathduck No, I haven't enabled the extra clients, they were always disabled.

I have tried correlating processes in Vivaldi's Task manager versus the ones in Windows Task manager.

Only the root node in Vivaldi's task manager showed 100 % usage, but none of the child processes showed more than 1 % when doing nothing, not even the GPU process.

Windows task manager showed high usage on one of the subprocesses as you can see in the video. If I killed that one process, whole Vivaldi got killed along with all of its child processes.

[Pathduck]

@vybo The "root node" would usually be the "Browser" process, this is the native Chromium parent process.

There are other native processes like GPU etc. Vivaldi itself runs as an App process. Each tab and extension also has their own PIDs. There's also a couple like crashpad-handler that don't show up in the Shift+ESC view but shows up in the OS taskman.

To understand what is taking up CPU it's important to find which process is causing the usage first. Of course, most users don't even understand things like processes at all, they just see "Vivaldi using a lot of CPU"...

[vybo]

@Pathduck What information in particular would help you in identifying which process in particular is causing the issue, if it's the Chromium parent itself, as you described it, if it happens again?

I imagine Windows Task Manager wouldn't give us more useful information, since PIDs are generated dynamically and the high usage one wasn't visible in the more useful browser's task list anyway.

[Pathduck]

@vybo Not more than once the process is known, it might give a better idea of what's causing the load.

If it's an extension process or a tab process, the cause would be obvious (heavy site, bad extension etc).
If it's the GPU process, could be a GPU driver issue.
I believe any CPU load from Mail/RSS/Calendar client would come from the Vivaldi App process and also the Browser process.
If it's the Browser process it's basically Chromium code so a lot harder to know what is going on.
And so on... this isn't an exact science, it's a lot of guesswork for us that don't know Chromium's code

Of course, if one is advanced, you could use Process Explorer and view the process' threads, might get closer to the answer. If one adds the Windows and Chromium symbols files to ProcExp it might even give the current method call being done in the thread.

Next step would be to attach a debugger and maybe generate some native dumps to examine the data structures in the process. This is what a developer would do if they saw the same problem on their machine.

I'm not a Chromium developer nor do I work at Vivaldi, so I'm stuck at the "mostly guessing" part